Project Zanaris. It’s been in the works for some time, first surfacing in a survey a couple of years ago before being fully revealed in September, 2024. At RuneFest 2025 we got a closer look at what it has to offer, with Jagex showcasing a formidable new Rat King-inspired mode, as well as the PvP Falador Fight Club. The community servers are a place where your wildest, most chaotic dreams can become a reality, and they’re now one of Old School RuneScape‘s most hotly anticipated features. Speaking exclusively to PCGamesN, senior tech designer Tom ‘Mod Tomb’ Burk and senior product manager Tom ‘Mod TJ’ Jackson (yes, that got confusing very quickly) tell me about their ambitions for Zanaris, and how they plan to embrace the anarchy.
At its core, Project Zanaris champions freedom and creativity. You can create your own server, invite the people you want to play with, and design your own unique modes using 400 different Parameters (read modifiers, with that number set to increase). Jagex is effectively giving you the keys to Old School RuneScape and asking you to go wild; Zanaris truly celebrates the MMORPG‘s community.
But a lot of modern day videogame development feels like it revolves around balance; tweak a few numbers here, a few others there, and hopefully everything plateaus. Walking that tightrope isn’t easy, but Zanaris throws caution to the wind – you can increase enemy damage to the nth degree, or instate a server-wide Ironman. I ask Tomb and TJ if OSRS is at its best when it’s chaotic, and how (or if) they plan to keep Zanaris from spiralling out of control.
“It’s an interesting dichotomy,” TJ says. “Sometimes I choose chaos, sometimes I don’t, and having the ability to do both is really good. Old School RuneScape will continue to be a of pillar of the MMORPG community where what goes into it makes it better – there’s the consultation, the polls and everything – [but Zanaris] allows you to go ‘fuck it, I’m going rogue.’
“We’ll provide the tools for players to find the worlds they want, so if you’re like ‘I want chaos today’ you can find a chaotic world. But maybe you want to have a more balanced, constrained, peaceful time and just vibe with it, and I’m sure there’ll be worlds where you can do that.”
“One thing we’re focusing on is giving players as much control as possible,” Tomb continues. “We want hosts to be able to create a world where, on Tuesday mornings, it’s absolute carnage time, everything’s on fire, it’s chaos everywhere, then on Wednesdays, it’s similar to Old School where everything’s peaceful and you’ve got your environment that you know. We want you to be able to chop and change on the fly.”
“I’m not sure if it’s the correct term – it’s a common term in survival PvP games like Rust and Scum – but it’s called the ‘Dad Server,” TJ says, eliciting a chuckle from the room. “During the day there’s no combat and it’s all peaceful, but then on the weekend you can have more carnage. I think a lot of people in Old School want to play PvP, but they also want to PvE, so they can do the grind to gear up ‘safely’ during the week and maybe have carnage on the weekend.”
But letting players run riot can be a double-edged sword: what if they create modes that are simply better and more popular than the ones that Jagex itself has in the works? I ask the duo if that adds extra incentive to keep thinking outside of the box when it comes to Old School, and whether or not an inventive new player mode could make it into the core game.
“I would be naïve of us to say that no inspiration will come from what players create – players are going to create some cool stuff, and developers are going to play it and be like ‘this is cool, how do we get that [into OSRS]?’” Tomb states. “I don’t think there’s a world where it becomes one for one, but I think it’ll be a conversation. I can see in the future that lots of those game modes and features – especially when we get to pave the way for creative tooling to let players create their own quests and bosses – will open the doors for collaboration with the players where we ask ‘how can we push this into the game?’
“There are regularly ideas on Reddit like yellow text, black background that, as a team, we’re like, ‘that’s a great idea, we should do that,’” TJ says. “The best ideas are not going to come from us; they’re going to come from the players. But [Zanaris] also allows for ideas where we’re like ‘that’s an amazing idea, it’s just not right for Old School RuneScape.’ People can do it in their environment because it’s contained to their world. Maybe you want to just, I don’t know, ruin the game! You can do that because you’ve made your own world.”
I respond with “it’s RuinScape spelled ‘ruin,’” and honestly, sometimes I think I should have been a comedian.
So far we’ve seen two Jagex-created worlds, Rat King and Falador Fight Club, but I ask TJ and Tomb about their own creations and what those have looked like.
“One of my favorite ideas was a desert heat mechanic where the games would be punishing,” Tomb recalls. “Then we tried it out and went ‘it’s okay’ – I wanted it to be good, but it wasn’t. It’s okay to have a bad one.”
“I play a lot of MMOs and often the meta gets discovered so quickly,” TJ chimes in. “I can either do my path that everyone will tell me is a waste of time but I’m having fun, or I can follow the guides. Randomizers are becoming quite popular in the community – what if I go to cut down a tree but it actually gives me fishing XP? I now don’t know what things are. That’s one area of total chaos that I quite like, but not because it’s chaos, but because it changes the meta.
“But then, for just pure chaos, one of the ideas was ‘what if you had a giant snail chasing you, then when it touches you, it dies?’” Poor snail, he was just a chill ‘lil guy.
There’s no current release date for Project Zanaris, but, beginning in April, Jagex has opened a new wave of playtests for players to dive into. All you have to do is sign up using this form, or you can get involved via the official OSRS Discord.
In the meantime, however, we have a list of all the best free MMORPGs if you’re looking for something new. Or, alternatively, here’s our rundown of all the best multiplayer games to play with your pals.
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